Tabloid

LONDON - Britain's tabloid newspapers have not been squeamish about showing some of the more ghastly images of the war in Iraq. Corpses and bloodied victims of bombings have been common on their front pages. But of all the carnage shown since the war began, photographs published yesterday in The Daily Mirror, a national daily with a circulation of nearly 2 million, may do more harm to the coalition efforts to calm Iraq than all those published before. The photographs - which have not been authenticated - show what appears to be an Iraqi prisoner being kicked, beaten with a rifle and urinated on by British soldiers.

Eddie Clontz, 56, longtime editor of The Weekly World News, died of liver and kidney disease and complications from diabetes Jan. 26 at his home in Salt Springs, Fla. As editor of the outlandish national weekly tabloid, Mr. Clontz always knew what he would do if he received a phone call from someone who said he had a Martian living in his bedroom. It wasn't what other editors would do. "I'd tell the guy, `Great, we'll send a reporter right over,'" Mr. Clontz said in a speech to the Florida Press Club some years ago. Mr. Clontz operated in an alternate journalistic universe - one populated by space aliens, talking cats and gardeners who married their vegetables.

Alec Baldwin says he's a new man. After an ugly split from actress Kim Basinger - and a decade of headlines about the couple's acrimonious public spats - he insists he's no longer a tabloid-hating, Republican-baiting, angry tough guy. "I am changed as a human being as a result of this," Baldwin tells the New York Daily News. "I don't want any unnecessary conflict, I don't want to take any risks. ... You wind up living a very cautious lifestyle after something like this happens to you."

Truth or Tabloid? by Peter Fenton. Three Rivers Press, 202 pages $12.95. Fenton spent 15 years as a reporter for the National Enquirer, and knows the nature and dynamics of supermarket-counter tabloids. He's put that sense and apparently elaborate files into this game book -- about 100 lists of five or six generally outrageous declarations of "fact" that challenge the reader or competitor to decide whether each one is "truth" or "tabloid." None is both. Among my many favorites: "Tofu Makes You Stupid."

Brenda Riley has been an entrepreneur for a while - she has owned a women's consignment shop and she has been a marketing consultant - but the one challenge that has been consistent has been getting her name and company known in the community. So her latest venture is targeted at helping small companies get their name in print. Focus Magazine is a new publication celebrating the creativity and talent of people of African descent and keeping a finger on the pulse of blacks in communities between Baltimore and Washington.

It would be difficult to imagine a better novel about celebrity than Martha Sherrill's terrific My Last Movie Star (Random House, 349 pages, $23.95). Hardboiled Clementine James profiles movie stars and moviemakers for New York's haute hip and trop trendy Flame magazine. Having determined that her work and by extension her life has become shallow, Clem agrees to one final profile before retiring to a horse farm with the ruggedly handsome Ned. Her subject is Allegra Coleman, daughter of failed B-movie actress Kay Blyth and successful drag queen and painter Max Coleman.

LONDON - Maybe autumn's tabloid feeding frenzy about butler sex in the Royal Palace is to blame for the blase reaction to the latest news concerning the Royal Family. Maybe it is that, after revelations that Princess Diana had been wooing a man by wearing only her birthday suit under a fur coat, secret rendezvous of the 1930s seems relatively mild. Whatever the case, Britain has reacted with a collective yawn to new information about the royal crisis of the 1930s, when King Edward VIII abdicated in the name of love, for Wallis Warfield Simpson of Baltimore, who, the news is, had enough love inside her that she also shared it with a used-car salesman, among others.

The National Enquirer: Thirty Years of Unforgettable Images, with essays by Steve Coz and Jonathan Mahler (Talk Miramax books, 256 pages, $45). Something squarely between total, dismissive contempt and shameless adulation is where most sane Americans hold The National Enquirer. It's considered mannerly, I suppose, to scorn it as despicably tabloid!!! -- but it seems to rustle off the racks in America's supermarkets, faster yet than its close cousins, which reach even further out into the mystical, mythic and mindless.

WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle became a target of an apparent anthrax attack, when an aide to the South Dakota Democrat opened an envelope yesterday containing powder that tested positive for the germ. Two more cases of anthrax came to light yesterday. In New York, officials at ABC News said last night that the infant son of an employee has been diagnosed with the skin form of anthrax. The child, who was not identified, was said to be responding well to treatment. In Florida, a 73-year-old employee of the tabloid newspaper company where one man died from the disease was also confirmed to have contracted anthrax.

BOCA RATON, Fla.- As FBI investigators struggle to figure out who would deliver deadly anthrax spores into the headquarters of the country's largest tabloid publisher, some employees think a better question might be: Who wouldn't? "In some ways, I'm surprised somebody didn't blow up the building a long time ago," says Barry Dutter, a writer for the Weekly World News, part of America Media Inc., the company under investigation. "Certainly our papers have made a lot of enemies over the years."